SCIENTISTS HAVE begun digging for corpses at the site of a former Tokyo medical college allegedly used to conduct biowarfare trials, reopening one of the darkest chapters of Japan’s wartime past.
Activists campaigning for the excavation say dozens of bodies were buried under the site at the end of the second World War in an effort to cover up biological tests on prisoners, some while still alive.
“They dug a hole 10 metres deep and for a month after Japan’s surrender, they threw bodies into it,” recalled Toyo Ishii (88), a former nurse at the college. “The bodies included those of people who had been used in experiments to test the effects of germs.”
Ms Ishii said she and others helped to dump bodies and body parts and were told to ignore questions about what took place there. An apartment building was built on top of the grave “so it would not be dug up again”. A former medical school staff member who knew the facts lived in the building to keep guard, she added.
The facility was reportedly linked to Japan’s Unit 731, then the most elaborate biological warfare programme. A 6.4km complex of buildings south of Harbin in China turned typhoid, anthrax, smallpox, cholera and dysentery into mass-produced killers.
Live prisoners were dissected to determine the effects of pathogens on the human body. The harvested results were used to spread typhoid, cholera and plague across China. Soldiers dumped pathogens in rivers and water supplies. Fleas were cultivated to carry plague, then dumped over Chinese villages.
The effectiveness of the experiments is widely disputed, but some historians put the casualty count in the six-figure range.
After the war, the Japanese military scientists who had built the programme were given amnesty by the US occupation, in exchange for their research findings.
The military seal of approval meant immunity for the key figures, including the programme’s architect Shiro Ishii, who died of natural causes in Tokyo in 1959. Many had lucrative postwar careers in the medical industry.
Japan’s military high command ordered the dynamiting of Unit 731’s Chinese facilities as the end of the war approached. Japanese governments have never officially acknowledged their existence, successfully fighting a 2002 demand for compensation by Chinese victims of the experiments.
The site would likely have remained undiscovered were it not for the efforts of local residents, who demanded that the human remains be exhumed. Tokyo’s metropolitan government wanted to turn the site, which housed many of the imperial army’s main facilities, into a public sports ground.
Excavations were finally ordered five years ago by the conservative Liberal Democrat-led government but were delayed while buildings on the site were demolished and residents rehoused.
Government officials are playing down expectations. “We are not certain if the survey will find anything,” health ministry official Kazuhiko Kawauchi told Associated Press. “If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731, but activists say the dig is very important.”
“It was a horrific war crime and deserves to be more widely known,” said veteran Japanese civil rights lawyer Keiichiro Ichinose, who helped to lead the 2002 Chinese suit. “Japan must acknowledge its past before it can move forward.”